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Quoted from Skyride

[…]

Ye. It’s a kind of a shame really. “This is why we can’t have nice things”.

Go to work, balance needs coding *whips*

I think there’s been a misunderstanding. Setlet, you do indeed only have one warning and as such I don’t think the ban was justified. I’ve spoken with huhy about it and we decided to undo the ban with immediate effect.

FREE BEAVERN!

Oh wait… wrong topic…

Ye, admittedly I should have made a point of doing the warns, but 3 no-shows is a short ban, it’s not fair on other people especially when you do it regularly. “My hightling isn’t working properly” is not an excuse. If you can’t set up your IRC client properly, thats your problem.

(Just a note, if you realise you can’t play and get a sub yourself in a reasonable period of time, you won’t get a warn).

Quoted from antyjc

vanilla+medlocks would be so good on pixel, make it happen! people will whine, but still play it regardless.

Quoted from Skyride

I’m going to make the channel medlocks only tomorow. I’ll probably update this post with a more fleshed out explanation of my reasoning, but essentially its that the top level of this game is screaming for medlocks to become the standard, and TF2 seems to be the only game where its an acceptable line of reasoning to disregard the top level as being “elitist” on matters of how the game should be played. I tend to agree with them and I don’t think supporting anything other than medlocks given the direction of this game commercially makes any sense.

Discuss/flame/whatever, It’s happening.

n1 :D

This is going to be so much fun… =D

Pixel Pickup is now officially Vanilla + Blutsauger/Kritzkreig/Ubersaw. I know a lot of people won’t be happy about this, so I’m going to put a proper post explaining why.

It’s not really a secret I don’t play this game much. The sum total of time I spend playing TF2 these days effectively amounts to a mix or two a week, along with a couple of hours of pub (the vast majority of which is bball and dm_store). However for some reason I still really enjoy working on projects and keeping up with the scene (contrast that play time with the fact I spend 10hrs on Thursday coding something you’ll be seeing on vanillatf2 in the near future). The upshot of this is that I feel I have a slightly unique and distanced perspective of the community, which means I can sometimes see things in ways that a lot of people wouldn’t consider. My feelings on the unlocks thus have very little to do with my own personal experience with them.

Show me any other successful sport on the planet where the views and opinions of top players/teams, are not given significantly more weight, if not outright the only group taken seriously on matters of how the game should be played. TF2 to seems to be in this ridiculous situation where the opinions of jimmy the random div5 player, are given equal weight to that of a prem/div1 player who has been playing this game virtually since it was released, and other games for years competitively before it. It’s not even a case “elitism”, it’s just simply having the humility to go “ok, this person is a lot better than me, so it’s probably worth listening to what they have to say”. The majority of top level players are absolutely screaming to have this game vanilla + medlocks, and have been doing so with increasing volume pretty much since the scout update. The fact that this has been almost entirely disregarded by a significant majority of players in ETF2L to me is an absolutely disgusting show for an otherwise fairly intelligent community.

Secondly, it’s not even like this is “prem/div1 vs everyone else”. There is an incredibly large number of people in every division who are pro-vanilla, it just doesn’t affect them enough at their level of play to get up in arms about it. The result being that the biggest noise coming from the lower divisions is this dribbletastic pro-unlock whining.

Another ridiculous fallacy that keeps popping up is this idea that “unlocks = fun” and “vanilla = stale/boring”. There’s no point even getting into that debate, or even how its silly because “fun is subjective”. If you think that vanilla is boring, and the game needs a constant stream of new unlocks to keep it interesting, then – and I mean this in the politest way possible – you need to reconsider if COMPETITIVE gaming is something you really want to be involved in. The whole point of playing something competitively is to always strive to be the best, get your fun merely from competing and develop a deep and complex meta-game. Look at football. It’s the simplest bloody thing in the world. On the surface it’s just 2 teams of 11 guys kicking a ball about trying to get it into the other teams goal, and whoever has done it the most times after 90 minutes wins. But it isn’t as simple as that, Football has an extremely well developed meta game (to the point where people don’t even recognise it as such) that involves organised tactics and mind games, as well as just the sheer number of smaller skills required to pull them off. That’s effectively what any e-Sport is at the top level.

Another thing is, and I know this is an extremely controversial thing to say, Valve doesn’t care about competitive TF2. It’s not that they are actively against it, it’s just when it comes down to deciding what to put their money and resources into, competitive TF2 isn’t going to make any noteworthy dint on their figures at the end of the fiscal year, so they don’t have any reason to. Compare this to how much money they are making from the Mann Co store and it’s quite obvious. I’m not having a go at Valve here, I’d do exactly the same thing in their position, I’m just pointing this out because a lot of people don’t seem to realise it.

Honestly, taking all this into consideration it just seems blindingly obvious that the future of TF2 lies in Vanilla, So I’m quite frankly happy to put my personal reputation on the line to try and make it happen.